Bad experience with 000webhost

Back in Jan 2012 I wanted a cheap web host for putting up this personal website. I came across 000webhost.com, which claimed free hosting in a limited environment. Forget cheap I went off with free . They lay various limitations on disk space, data transfer, uptime, and more; which are certainly acceptable for it being totally free. Though some of the claimed features does not work like backups, auto scripts; uptime is about 93% not 99% as claimed; but it wasn’t a deal breaker for me.

I was having a good time with them just until yesterday when I pinged my domain to find out it was dead. Repeated attempts failed, IsUp failed. I logged into the member area and found out it was deactivated due to “being inactive”. Inactive?? Really?? I have been updating something or the other at least weekly. Ok, lets say I am an inactive user and wasted their limited resources, then they could have at least sent a warning e-mail before just trashing all my data!! I can think of suspension but this action was too severe.

May be they just realized I was not gonna upgrade to the premium paid hosting, which they always spammed about. “So lets just delete it all and chuck him out”. Guys I just ask for a mail; it would have left me with a lastest backup.

Anyways, I am up now (on a paid hosting ). Not completely though as I skipped the blog backup . I recovered some of the text from google cache, but could not find all the posts. So, its like a clean road again.